I post lots of articles comparing radios and recently I came up with a list of particular radios I’m calling my “keepers.” I briefly thought I might compare them side by side. How many comparisons would that be? The old math major in me immediately pulled out the formula for the number of combinations of n things (in this case 17) taken r at a time (where r = 2 for side-by-side comparison).
C(17, 2) = 136. If I throw out the less serious entries, the list becomes 11 long, I’m still left with 55 combinations for these radios:
- Eton Elite Executive *
- HanRongDa HRD-757
- LiJiANi Rd239
- Qodosen DX-286
- Sangean ATS-405
- Sihuadon R-108
- Tecsun PL-330 *
- Tecsun PL-660 *
- Tecsun PL-990 *
- XHDATA D-109WB
- XHDATA D-808 *
(*) Radio has SSB
Divide and conquer
I could divide the radios into two groups: those with single sideband (5) and those without (6) and compare only within groups. Comparisons now are down to C(6,2) + C(5,2) = 25, but that wouldn’t be useful for the international shortwave broadcast enthusiast who doesn’t care about SSB.
Rating
Another approach is to find an objective standard and assign each radio a score according to that standard, and maybe if I had some fancy test equipment, I could to that, but I don’t. Using shortwave broadcast signals is a problem because shortwave reception changes from minute to minute and the evaluation is somewhat subjective.
Reference Radio
What I might do is choose a “reference radio” and compare every other one to it. What would that radio be? I wouldn’t want to pick the best or the worst of the lot. It should probably be one with SSB and I’d also want a radio that many people had. The immediate thought is the Tecsun PL-330 and another popular option is the XHDATA D-808. My personal preference is the Tecsun.
Let’s go with that. The shakedown cruise will be a comparison of the Tecsun PL-330 with the incoming HanRongDa HRD-757 when it arrives, but I’ll grandfather two previous articles that fit.
The articles: